10/22/2012

Note: I wrote this a little over three years ago, just after I retired my old blog. I sat down this morning, planning to update it and post it, but something I swear isn't laziness compelled me to leave it as it is (laziness). If you are new here and are interested in following the saga of my oldest daughter's seizures, you can find it all over my old blog, especially here, here, and here. For the many of you who have contacted me to find out how she is doing now, the short answer is, she's doing fine. Very fine. The long answer will come soon.

I have stopped speaking to my family. I communicate now
through grunts, squeaks, waving hands, and, if necessary, tersely worded notes,
the latter being the least effective as 2/3rds of my kids cannot yet read.

I have stopped speaking because of the tarantula in my
house. More specifically, I have stopped speaking because of the size of the
tarantula in my house and what the size of the tarantula in my house does to my
voice. The size of the tarantula in my house makes my voice sound unpleasantly
high, like the voice of a frightened nine-year-old girl. Which is doubly
embarrassing because the tarantula belongs to a nine-year-old girl, and she’s
having no trouble at all speaking, thank you very much. She got the beast for
Christmas. She named her Imelda.

Or maybe she named him
Imelda. I don’t know. I’m not sure if there’s any way to tell the sex of a live
tarantula. I’m certainly not flipping it over to check. I’d say it doesn’t
matter except female tarantulas live about 15 to 20 years longer than males.
And males jump. They jump. I’m not sure if the jumping contributes to the
male’s short life expectancy in general, but it certainly will in my house.

My daughter Kathryn picked the name Imelda from a website of
“cool & fun spider names.” It means “powerful fighter.” Kathryn says that’s
why she chose it, but I’m guessing that she chose it because it was the only “cool
& fun” spider name listed that didn’t appear to be lifted from The Lord of the Rings. “Ungoliant” was neither
cool nor fun enough for her.

We got Imelda for Kathryn for two reasons. One, Imelda is
not a bird. I hate birds. That Imelda can possibly kill and eat birds is the
one thing she has in her favor right now. The second reason we got Imelda is
Kathryn asked for it.

Something you may not know, but should in case your daughter
ever has a seizure while climbing the stairs of her elementary school, is that
if your daughter ever has a seizure while climbing the stairs of her elementary
school, you will buy her whatever she asks for. Even it it’s poisonous.

It wasn’t Kathryn’s first seizure at school. It wasn’t her
worst seizure either. Kathryn has something called Rolandic epilepsy, sometimes
referred to as “childhood” epilepsy. It is supposed to go away when she hits
puberty, which means I am now the only dad in our town actively hoping my
daughter goes through puberty early. It also means in a few years we’ll be
trading in a daughter whose brain problems can be treated with medicine for one
whose brain problems cannot. It’s a devil’s trade.

Kathryn’s seizures first appeared two years ago. They
started off mild, but have grown steadily worse until just before Christmas
when she seized on the stairs of her elementary school and used that
opportunity to ask for a tarantula.

“It’s not a bird,” she said later that evening. “And it’s
cool.” I couldn’t argue with either one of those. Truth is, I thought it was cool. A teacher at Kathryn’s
elementary school had once brought a tarantula to school, and Kathryn had
amazed her classmates by letting it crawl across her arm. If, when Kathryn was
born nine years ago, someone had asked me what kind of girl I’d hoped she would
grow into, I’d have said the kind that lets tarantulas crawl across her arm.
I’m not sure, though, I would have added “and wants to own one as a pet.” And
I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have mentioned a seizure disorder at all.

The next day, Kathryn had a seizure during a grammar test.
She lost consciousness. It was followed by another, smaller episode just after
that. And then finished the test, the teacher kindly wiping the drool off the
unfinished pages while Kathryn collected herself. She got an 87. She tried to
hide the test from us because it was not an A. She also asked again for a
tarantula.

That night, after we had gotten Kathryn and her sisters to
bed, I turned to my wife. “Are we going to get Kathryn a tarantula because she
has epilepsy?

“Yes,” said my wife. “Be happy she didn’t ask for a pony.”

So now we have a tarantula. We bought it on the Internet.
And it’s size does terrible things to my voice. It’s not big, you see. It’s very,
very small. It’s a baby, no more than a quarter of an inch from leg to leg. One
minute after we put it in its little enclosure, it disappeared. Maybe it
burrowed down in the earth we put in there with it. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s
not in there at all.

Its friend disappeared, too. The dealer we bought Imelda
from threw in an extra one, a bonus baby tarantula, just in case the first one
didn’t survive the journey. The second one is maybe half the size of Imelda.
Kathryn hadn’t known it was coming, so she hadn’t had a chance to come up with
a name. She let the twins name it. It’s called Foo Foo Cuddily Poops. We think
it burrowed down, too, when we put it in its little cage. Maybe not. Maybe it escaped
and is somewhere in the house. Hiding. Eating. Growing. Maybe Foo Foo Cuddily
Poops has found Imelda and together they have decided that together they may be
able to take down bigger prey.

10/17/2012

I got my first job when I was eleven years old. I was short for my age, but with a clean face and almost shoulder-length straight blond hair. If you knew me then, you'd easily agree that my looks peaked at eleven. If you didn't, you'd still quickly agree, your haste betraying your relief that I'd ever had a peak at all.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be eleven. While on my blogging break, I wrote a lot, trying to add "unfinished novelist" to my long list of abandoned careers, but to my surprise, I finished one, a middle grade novel with a main character who's eleven.

When I was eleven, a renaissance fair opened up on a few acres of land outside my home town of Waxahachie, Texas and my first job ever was as a character there. Auditioning for the job was my dad's idea, possibly because he thought it'd be a fun experience for me but mainly because he was sick of seeing me sitting in front of the TV, spending my evenings reciting entire episodes of Monty Python with the sound off.

The fair was like no place I'd ever been before. The people who worked there were a wonderful and strange group. They lived in trailers in the parking lot, traveling gypsies of the renaissance fair circuit, as much stuck in the 1960s as they were in the Middle Ages. I've never worked with a friendlier or more generous group of people, but their lives were far removed from any I'd encountered before. They snorted snuff from boxes and swallowed swords. They were quick witted and casually sexual. One evening as the season was winding down, the queen of the festival bent down to me and asked, "Do you want to feel something amazing?" When I nodded, she leaned in close, delicately placed both lips on my eyes, and gently sucked my eyelids into her mouth, one after the other.

I kissed my first girl at that renaissance fair, drank my first wine cooler there,
and ran my first con. It was something I made up myself and I
was rather proud of it, considering it successful because I made money
more often than I got beat up.

The con was simple and stupid, in a very eleven-year-old way. I stood on a wooden bridge in the center of the fair and, when people passed by, I offered to jump for a quarter. If someone took me up on it, I'd look for someone else to pay me double not to jump. The bridge wasn't terribly high, but it was high enough. A rocky creek flowed underneath and most times there was someone crossing who didn't want to see a little kid jump and get hurt. The con worked best when there was a bidding war, back and forth between the pro-jumpers and the anti-jumpers. I always let the pro-jumpers win. My biggest take was $18 from a drunk guy who was not going to back down while his horrified girlfriend kept trying to outbid him to keep me safe. I took his money and I jumped, just like I did for everyone. I gave a little hop, right there in the center of the bridge.

To people's credit, most of them just groaned and moved on after I'd done my stupid little hop. Only once did someone take things into their own hands and pick me up and toss me over the railing themselves. I can't say I didn't have it coming, but I should note that if you ever throw a little kid off a bridge, you should make sure he doesn't count people wearing chainmail among his close friends.

It was the kind of con a person could only pull when they were eleven. The next year I tried to do it again, but the results were unsatisfying. People were angrier, less likely to laugh it off, more likely to bring out fists. Eleven was the perfect age.

10/15/2012

Once my daughter was served a hot dog that had a plastic bag inside. Not inside the bun; inside the actual hot dog. She was a fussy eater, the kind that decorates the seat around her with strings of those things that aren't quite banana but aren't quite peel, and after the first bite of hot dog, she made a face and started picking at it. And then she pulled out a plastic bag.

I do not know how an entire plastic bag got inside the casing of this hot dog, but it did. She pulled out a corner of it and then some more and then some more, like a magician performing the most disgusting trick ever conceived. When the whole thing finally came out, I half expected it to be attached to a string of multi-colored handkerchiefs or for a dove to emerge from the hole and fly to the ceiling, shaking off its coating of meat by-product and drawing gasps and applause from everyone around.

I'm leading with this story, making it the first post on this new blog. If it helps, consider it a metaphor.